Tag Archives: software development

I.T. in higher ED: In the end, it’s about people

As a UNIX systems engineer at Virginia Tech, Josh Akers ’07 is charged with “provisioning” a few dozen “enterprise systems” at university, while also “administrating VMware infrastructure” and supporting operation of “Advanced Research Computing clusters.” “Anyone in the field would know what I’m talking about,” said Akers, who majored in computer science at EMU. But ...More

The one and only John Fairfield

This is a man who spent much of 1970-71 in Belgium’s national library absorbing British computer research. He was learning French too in Brussels, so that he could use French to teach math, physics and economics at a Congolese mission school. This is a man who lived with his wife in a mud hut for ...More

Former Jenzabar men co-own VistaShare 

As a teenager in the mid-1970s, Daryl Myers ’84 didn’t know anyone who owned a computer in his town of Lowville, New York. But he took his own money, trekked to a Radio Shack store and bought a TRS 80. “It was really just a calculator on steroids,” he laughs now. It had no games, ...More

In defense of learning weird stuff in college

Running a power plant effectively requires keeping tabs on an awful lot of data relating to fuel consumption, power output, weather conditions, grid demand, etc. & etc. And in turn, keeping tabs on all this data effectively requires clever software that allows users to visualize and understand what might otherwise be a confounding torrent of ...More

I.T. entrepreneurs

Starting in refugee camps Philip Borkholder’s ’89 journey to information technology began by majoring in fields that had little to do with computer science: biology and international agricultural development. This led to a five-year stint with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) shortly after graduation in 1989. Borkholder spent one year in Honduras and four in El ...More